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I once read a study of string quartets and communication methods. Some quartets were nice to each other and polite and tried not to hurt each other's feelings. Others insulted each other and said just what they thought.

But they did this in rehearsal, in a small group. Pretty sure if they did this in public, their employment would be confined to circuses.

Linux is not the only OSS project there is, and Linus’ way of running it is not the only way there is. Rubyists, e.g., used to aspire to MINASWAN (Matz is nice and so we are nice), and even at its most dysfunctional, abuse in the Perl community was held in check by the fact that Larry Wall is a thoroughly decent guy.

If you’re interested in contributing to a project, it’s easy enough to listen in on the mailing lists and figure out whether the tone appeals to you.

Telling me "you made a stupid fucking mistake" isn't any worse than "Please don't take this too harshly and please don't think I am picking on you. I like you and you are a swell fellow and all. However, I feel it is necessary that I impress upon you that this isn't really a bug and having this trivial and non-broken thing filed as a bug has consumed a little bit of our time that we would rather not be wasting on things like this. Also, here is a pat on the back and an atta-boy so you don't feel I am being mean to you, okay?".

Or you could say “this works as designed”, thus keeping the focus on technology, as it should be, instead of needlessly dragging people issues into it.

Some managers think shouting and yelling is appropriate, others manage to do without.

Rumor is Apple managers are all like that, but I can't comment on that rumor.

I’ve come across an occasional rude manager at Apple, but in my experience they constitute a tiny minority. Most engineers here wouldn’t stand for that kind of treatment. Jobs could certainly be that way at times, but luckily this part of his style was not all that contagious.

Cocoa crucially depends on reflection features of the underlying language (obtaining classes, calling methods and manipulating data members by name). Lisp would obviously qualify for this (for sufficiently large values of "Lisp"), but standard Ada and Eiffel would be completely unsuited to the task, and I doubt OCaml would be suited.

I could see Ruby become an increasingly serious contender, though. Right now, the primary problem is that debugging is messier than in an Objective-C app, but otherwise, it's an excellent match.

ruphus13 writes "Nmap has a new release out, and it's a major one. It includes a GUI front-end called Zenmap, and, according to the post, 'Network admins will no doubt be excited to learn that Nmap is now ready to identify Snow Leopard systems, Android Linux smartphones, and Chumbies, among other OSes that Nmap can now identify. This release also brings an additional 31 Nmap Scripting Engine scripts, bringing the total collection up to 80 pre-written scripts for Nmap. The scripts include X11 access checks to see if X.org on a system allows remote access, a script to retrieve and print an SSL certificate, and a script designed to see whether a host is serving malware. Nmap also comes with netcat and Ndiff. Source code and binaries are available from the Nmap site, including RPMs for x86 and x86_64 systems, and binaries for Windows and Mac OS X. '"